A Wizard of Earthsea

Finished this one in an evening, which for a fire lookout is saying something, most nights I read fifteen pages and fall asleep with the lamp burning oil I don’t have to spare. Le Guin doesn’t waste a sentence and somehow that made it slower to read, not faster, I kept stopping to sit with lines instead of moving through them.

Before he’s Ged the wizard he’s just a boy calling goats, learns a spell off his aunt by accident and ends up with the whole herd standing in the yard, more than he bargained for, she has to dispel the lot of it herself. That’s the whole book in miniature. Power comes before the sense to use it right, and somebody older has to clean up after. Ogion’s silences taught me more about restraint on the page than most books manage with dialogue, for a word to be spoken there has to be silence, before and after, and Le Guin actually writes that way, lets the white space do work.

The otak is the part that undid me though, that little creature curled at Ged’s shoulder through half the early chapters, barely a paragraph of description total, and then he’s gone, found dead, and it lands harder than it has any right to for how little page time it got. Reminded me of the marmots that show up around the tower in August, you don’t mean to get attached.

Some of the middle sags, all those unnamed islands blurring together, steep or sandy and not much else. Doesn’t matter. Five stars, the ending earns the quiet it’s been building toward the whole way.